Documenting Discoverer Meta-Data and Dashboards

If you have few minutes, please glance at the PDF and HTML documents below (HTML) http://www.infocaptor.com/sqlexport/eul_report_index.html (PDF) http://www.infocaptor.com/sqlexport/eul_report.pdf The PDF and HTML documents represent a complete snapshot of your Discoverer objects such as Business Areas, Folders, Items, Workbooks, dependencies. Along with that it also tells you the workbook sharing information, security and privilege settings. These documents are convenient in lot of situations for e.g. * Validating if anything has changed since the last snapshot * Comparing snapshots between Production and Development * Easy reference guide for Users to create their own workbooks * To find Items within Business Areas * Lineage documentation - Find out what is the root source of the data elements used in your Data-warehouse or Discoverer Every client that I have worked with have documentation needs for their Discoverer and Data-warehouse installations. As of today, the documentation is manually done with little help from some SQL queries and reports. These documents are often not kept up-to-date and hence are not actively utilized in the right way. I have seen that sometimes the client does not even expect any kind of Documentation for their BI efforts as it is too laborious to produce it manually. To solve this common pain, I have come up with this simple mechanism where you just select the type of Export (Excel, PDF or HTML) and click on one Export button and within few seconds the document is automatically generated with all the beautiful formatting. These documents are ready to be published on your intranet or local file server. Along with this, you have the ability to generate Workbook performance statistics. You can get information such as 'What are the worst performing reports?', 'What are the least used workbooks?", "Top 20 reports by Business Area", "When was the report last run" etc Couple of my clients have already benefitted and are glad to have this tool in place. Similarly I think it would be very useful to generate similar kind of documentation against your BI enviornment. I know you can do away without documentation but once you see this working against your own BI installation, you will love it as someone else is generating it for you. Thank you for reading through this post. Dashboards, Reports and Documentation

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Hello Ravidranath, Oracle BI is sometimes an elaborated word. Earlier it used to mean Discoverer and other related tools but with recent acquisitions it covers the OBIEE (Siebel Analytics) and then there is a plus version which includes Hyperion products. Business Object is a company that creates BI software such as ad-hoc reporting and Dashboards. Similarly InfoCaptor is my company RudraSoft's Dashboarding software.

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I have over 10 years of experience working with various Oracle Apps and BI technologies, most recently with Daily Business ...
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I have over 10 years of experience working with various Oracle Apps and BI technologies, most recently with Daily Business Intelligence and Enterprise Planning and Budgeting. Through this blog I'd like to share some of my experiences.
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